


Code Refactored

by Ariibees



Category: Portal (Video Game)
Genre: Androids, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-13
Updated: 2019-06-13
Packaged: 2020-05-07 07:47:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19205008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ariibees/pseuds/Ariibees
Summary: Chell was free, left stranded and adrift in a sea of golden waving grass. She lost a friend named Wheatley and expected him to float in space forever. Virgil was trapped, subject to the orders given by the Central Core. He lost a friend named Mel and hoped to see her alive, soon.Chell is tenacious, having learned never to trust a core, even if they are friendly. Virgil is snarky and sarcastic, but has seen first hand what a human can do.Chell and Virgil make a deal, and for such an innocuous decision, the secrets they would discover would be Earth-shattering.(Takes place post-Portal:Stories Mel and Portal 2)





	Code Refactored

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fic made to explore the dynamics and personalities between the core-human duos from Portal 2 and Portal Stories: Mel. Mel will actually show up in this fic, too, along with a number of other characters; it isn't just revolving around those two. I want to explore the crazy world that makes up Aperture and how it's run! I also always thought of the Announcer, GLaDOS, and AEGIS as three parts of a set that keep the facility running while the cores populate it and work on their own. The only non-platonic ship is Virgil and the Rainbow core. :)
> 
> Look, I also just *really* want to see interaction between Chell and Virgil and after months of playing around with the idea finally wrote it myself. Chell and Wheatley have a very different dynamic than Mel and Virgil, where Chell has learned to trust no one and Virgil has learned to trust everyone. Mel and Wheatley will come up themselves, of course, don't worry! I also wanted to dive into some of the fun dynamics we see in the Meet the Cores videos showing how all the cores act around each other, because really, they're so fun...and they both acknowledge and ignore how people's brains were poured into computers, haha.

Chell raised her head to stare up at the massive building before her. The sun was rising behind its mass, leaving a shadow stretching across the forested landscape.

When she had escaped (or...been freed?) from Aperture, she had at first been elated. Sunshine felt  _ wonderful _ on her skin, so used to the harsh LEDs and fluorescents that gave Aperture its signature dingy, soulless look. Despite how ridiculous she must have looked, she ran through the golden grass surrounding the disguised shed she had been thrown from. It was, well, a  _ breath of fresh air _ for someone who had been stuck with recycled gasses for who-knows-how-many-years.

But eventually, the sheen of light from the blue sky and open lands had faded away as she was forced to realize that she had no clue where she was, left alone in barren...Michigan...land. Yes, Michigan sounded about right; perhaps the madman known as Cave Johnson had mentioned it in his speeches somewhere. But, back to her point: there was no one in sight, not even any buildings. The thought of the trek that would be awaiting her had even left her debating whether or not to drag her companion cube -- truly, the only fellow victim who understood her doubts and pains and had made it out alongside her -- but in the end, even if she saw almost no genuine value to it, she had picked it up and heaved it along.

Real friends were a commodity these days.

Past hills and ditches of waving grass, insects buzzing and the perfect clouds remaining in the sky, she was starting to wonder if this was just another test. After all, could freedom not be perfectly simulated with a decent treadmill and some good projectors? Luckily, her concerns were soon banished as she rounded one last hill on the horizon to see scrub brush below her. Well, a few bushes -- and beyond that, trees!

Her tired and sore legs picked up the pace again, springs on her long-fall boots compressing and bouncing with every bounding step, and she rushed into the wooded area, feeling the immediate drop in temperature as she was shaded from the hot sun. Then, beyond the trees, she found asphalt. A road, a parking lot, but not civilization; rather, it was the destroyed guard gate and office building she had been thrown from the first time she had defeated GLaDOS. The gaping hole they surely left as the AI’s chamber was destroyed appeared to have been patched, and the party escort bot nowhere in sight, but she wasn’t going to take any chances. Her stomach was rumbling, feet aching, but it wasn’t anything she hadn’t dealt with before, and she instead chose to follow the road, hoping it led to a town.

Over time, she found her way. She dug through cars, their fuel long since evaporated away, hoping for  _ anything _ edible. She found structures and created shelter of her own. She dealt with the elements, she kept her companion cube close, and she always kept walking day after day after day.

Hence where she stood in the present moment -- although it looked to be less of a gentle town and more of a collapsed empire. Massive walls rose on either side of her, cradling between them what looked like a collection of homely structures, like a small town farm off the beaten path had been surrounded over time by corporate enterprise. Vaguely, she felt recollection tugging at her, some long-forgotten memory of an old story book, perhaps; but sadly, like all other memories of her time before Aperture, it faded away just as quickly as it had appeared.

If she had held any doubts as to the owner of this town, she no longer had a single one -- above the entrance was a gigantic, arched sign welcoming her, clearly identifying the area. Despite the missing blue letters, it appeared to have once spelled “Aperture Laboratories.” Her first step hesitated, but she quickly reminded herself what caution had gotten her when sneaking was impossible, and she forced herself into the town. She needed food; whatever GLaDOS said about her, she couldn’t just live off of her “fat reserves.” Water was easier to find, but could just as easily leave her ill. As for shelter...well, she had gotten used to sleeping on the hard ground in nothing but her jumpsuit.

The trees outside had appeared healthy enough, but the town itself was worn down and collapsed at every turn, revealing itself to her as she passed through rickety fencing. The center appeared to have been an attempt at a park-like area with a rusted statue she recognized as the logo for Aperture Science Innovators. To corroborate her point, she stooped down, brushing years of collected dirt away from the placard to see a proud lettering stand apart from the metal: “Est. 1947.” This place was  _ old _ , and her heart sank; she couldn’t imagine there would be much in the way of supplies in this town, and certainly no other survivors, if there were any in the first place.

She hadn’t seen anyone else; that much was certain, and she herself had little in the way of sustenance anyway. She could only assume that either GLaDOS didn’t care what happened to Chell after she had found her freedom, or she had knowingly dumped the woman in the worst spot imaginable. Knowing the AI, likely both. Looking up, she squinted, staring at the small dust-filled beams of light breaking through the decaying roof over the facility. One full wall was open, but the others had been converted to form the sides of the surrounding facility, likely linked to the rest of the Enrichment Center. It really did look like they had meant to steamroll this place too, and ended up slapping a roof over it all and calling it a day. In its prime, she could only assume it to have been beautiful, a sun or moon hanging overhead. It looked like she had passed the entrance to a subway station or underground train car route on the way in -- this must have been, back in the day, what  _ everyone _ saw at first; astronauts, olympians, and war heroes all alike stepped into the town covered in shiny new paint, expensive cars parked in every space.

Some of the buildings around her were more intact; others were decidedly broken. Only a single car remained, perhaps one a glossy black but now rusted brown. The grass was dull, but green, and the structures surrounding her ranged from “fallen down” to “standing, but boarded up.” They were all overgrown, however, and lifeless, too -- excepting a single red light flashing in a central shack not too unlike the one she had exited out of, had it not been disguised as a shed for farm tools. Mushrooms grew rampant about the garden, but she didn’t know enough about them to be comfortable chowing down. Skirting the flashing light, she stepped into the partially-collapsed building behind it. And as she did, she stepped into another time, almost barking out a harsh laugh at the scene before her: a snapshot of 1950, just missing the tacky music. A loudspeaker crackled to life, but only played static, and she was able to comfortably ignore it, instead turning her focus to the peeling and browned posters along the walls. They were clear relatives of those she had seen during her time in Old Aperture, boasting over dietary substitutes made from deadly gels.

While repulsion gel that would cause food to  _ bounce out of her stomach _ wasn’t exactly what she was looking for, the prospect of something to eat was tempting, and she wandered deeper into the building, mood soaring as she came across what  _ appeared _ to be a vending machine sitting beside a window of cracked glass that led into long-abandoned laboratories. The machine proudly read “Ingest your own Aperture Cola” and while the branding alone was concerning (and some of the names even more so -- Repulsion Soda, Caffeinated Decaf), she was fairly confident in whatever the hell Citranium Soda was (a fruit drink?), and surely Aperture Cola was just a rebranded generic, right? She took a swing at the machine, followed by a good kick, and finally a body-slam, but it didn’t open up or spill anything into the money slot. Mouth twisting into a frown, she slowly felt her gaze turning deeper into the labs, lights off and only dimly lit by the lobby’s own bulbs.

It looked like that section was only a continuation of this building, not the one that had surrounded the site -- AKA not a part of the Enrichment center, rather a relic. More importantly, not connected to GLaDOS.

Welp. She was about to find out two things: 1 being if she was lucky enough to find a dime or similarly small metal chunk in the lab, and 2 being if soda could even last this long. If it was  _ really _ cooled to 3 Kelvin as the vending machine suggested, she had her hopes.

She turned to the cracked glass forming a window beside the vending machine. Slowly, she slung one leg over it, boot landing solidly on the tiled floor on the other side. Satisfied, she then took the other and pulled it over. No problems yet.

She took a single step forward…

And the ground caved in beneath her feet.

* * *

 

The maintenance core hummed down his management rail, stewing in repressed annoyance. Things had fallen into disrepair over the last many years, and the fact that one of the  _ oldest _ cores, had left him in charge of cleaning up. Not to mention “the incident” that had occurred not too long prior with the Intelligence Dampening Sphere. As it was, most of the other personality cores weren’t much help with his maintenance mission (and  _ some _ of them even got themselves into  _ more _ trouble! He spent half his days just repairing them, since the Central Core wouldn’t bother wasting Her resources or the Reassembly Machine’s time). But, in his opinion, being stuck doing the very job he had been built for was far preferable to his motherboard going critical on the cold, hard floor of an office wing. The Central Core oversaw the facility as a whole, of course, and managed major disasters where it mattered in the facility (including dictating his own work if necessary), but  _ he _ was the one who kept them in working order, and it was his pride and joy. He even created some test chambers! Not ones, of course, that She ever used -- that would be undermining Her authority, and he had no intention of ever directly interacting with her. That’s how one found themselves on a maintenance rail heading straight into the incinerator. Or  _ worse _ \-- while he had been fruitlessly trying to hold things together as the rogue Intelligence Dampening Sphere had taken the position as Central Core, he had been “privileged” to hear some of the creative torture ideas GLaDOS had been brainstorming with the human test subject.

He double-checked the work orders he had received: one of the old labs had caved in on itself, likely from the floor rotting away over time. That usually wouldn’t be an issue, considering much of Old Aperture was locked away underground. But, as luck would have it, debris must have fallen down in one of the overgrown chambers.

One of the chambers he and  _ Mel _ had run through to escape AEGIS.

Shaking himself out of his thoughts, he groaned with the realization of what cleaning up these chambers would entail. They were much closer to the surface, some even being filled with natural light in places where the structures overhead had sufficiently broken away -- hence why they were similarly filled with light, allowing plants to grow all over them. Just removing the overgrown plants would be a feat in and of itself; he was hoping that he would have to do minimal weedwacking to find the collapsed structure, assess it for further complications, and close the work ticket. That’s what it came down too -- since AEGIS couldn’t exactly scan for life in overgrown areas, and the cameras were often covered by leaves or simply non-existent, a core had to be sent out. But even for Virgil,  _ the _ maintenance core, he had his work cut out for him -- his duties where numerous, despite the fact that he had single handedly revived the nanobots crew that worked in the Enrichment Center. He was hoping that his task here was nothing major, merely checking the status of the surrounding chambers, as usually if one had issues surrounding ones would be of a similar state. There was only so much he could do with chambers at this point of disrepair, so once any problems were contained and stabilized, it was best for such a wing to be closed off.

Although She had complained quite a bit about picking up a whole wing of broken glass all alone. According to his records such a thing didn’t even exist, but would  _ he _ stop her from ranting and snarling at the latest subject of her fury? Absolutely not!

As he came nearer to the affected area -- a set of offices linking to observation areas for various testing tracks -- he slowed to a stop on his management rail. His sensors picked up a voice in the background, just barely audible.

“This is a reminder that test subjects and candidates are to remain in designated areas at all times. Please return to the testing track.”

Ah, he recognized that voice. The bigger question, now at the forefront of his thoughts, was exactly  _ why _ the Announcer was speaking. After GLaDOS had been shut down and the cores had been activated to keep the place going, the Announcer had taken over as the primary lead. He was a back-up system built to survive anything, maintaining the most mundane of the mundane jobs that kept the facility running -- keeping people in line, distributing orders from GLaDOS to personality cores like Virgil himself, overseeing production of turrets and neurotoxin. He gave a voice to the work they did: confirming that a file was deleted, pointing out errors and system warnings. He had no  _ real _ authority in the place -- no duty to report something he preferred to remain out of, for example. He did his job, and nothing more, although it was a little-known secret that he was so...well, boring...simply because he had to be uncorrupt and ready to override the Central Core -- only, naturally, when following orders to do as such. The least proactive, least offensive, least individual AI in the whole shop. Of course, none of that explained why he was seemingly speaking to a  _ test subject _ of all things. Weren’t they all, well, dead?

He wouldn’t be surprised if the Announcer was glitching. The poor guy took on the basic, menial jobs, but during the reign of the Intelligence Dampening Sphere had been almost  _ constantly _ screamed at to be silent, to ignore the problem, etc. etc. etc., apparently only keeping his job out of the goodness of the core’s heart. Who wouldn’t go a little mad dealing with such a thing? He wasn’t the most code-savvy, but he could at least try to scan for errors. Help out a friend, as he did with any other AI in the facility.

Still, the very mention of a test subject left his circuits buzzing and fans humming. He refused to become hopeful -- or dread what he saw. He knew that if it really was another test subject, and they were discovered by GLaDOS, they could very well be killed right away. Few were so tenacious as the human that had escaped the facility before -- or, uh, been thrown out. They wouldn’t last long. And if it  _ was _ Mel? She could very well meet the same fate. Virgil had been awfully damn bold standing up to the security system, of all things. It was about as strong willed and by-the-book as the Announcer but with some extra programming that enabled it to take action whenever necessary, almost matching the cold and thoughtless nature that GLaDOS used before with test subjects. When she wasn’t breaking character and mocking them, that was. But whatever the case, if Mel had found a life up on the surface, she  _ couldn’t _ be back!

Logically, the closest approximation he had to a heart was the motor running his power system -- and that motor ached. He had no clue what was up on the surface these days, and yet had upheld his end of the deal and called a lift to lead Mel off to the surface. What if she were hurt? What if she were dead!? He had no way to follow her to ensure her safety, and while she was intelligent and strong (she  _ deserved _ that silver medal, dammit!) the surface was a wild card. He had to be sure she was okay.

He screeched to a halt on his rail, sparks flying. The Announcer fell silent on the speakers, the only sound being the occasional clank or clatter from deeper within the facility, and all at once Virgil was hit by a dozen questions, thoughts, and feelings.

The test subject laying on the ground before him was a woman -- but not Mel, no doubt about that. Her skin was darker than Mel’s; she appeared to be mixed-race, Asian and European of some sorts, with black hair. Her right hand was bandaged and she was dressed in the unmistakable Aperture Science test subject uniform -- a pair of long-fall boots and an orange jumpsuit, although in her case, the latter was pulled down from her shoulders to be wrapped about her waist, exposing a tank top underneath. It wasn’t anyone he knew -- but then again, he often stayed within the depths of the facility, working. He had never even seen the test subject that had supposedly thrown several of their personality cores into space.

She was certainly breathing, but not moving. He scooted a bit closer on his rail, looking down at her. “Uh...hello?” She stirred at his comment, letting out a quiet noise, her eyes fluttering open -- and his motherboard nearly froze and went critical at the sight of the most piercing, bright, fierce blue eyes he had ever seen (not that he had much to compare it to --  _ Mel’s _ eyes were a deep green). An intense gaze, no doubt, but-

Her gaze locked on to her surroundings and without a sound she shoved herself to her feet, taking a wobbly step before falling to one knee. Her teeth her grit, her gaze solid, but one arm was slick with red blood.

“U-uh-” Virgil stammered, unsure what to say. He was a  _ mechanic,  _ an  _ engineer _ , he could only do so much to help a human, of all things. Not to mention he was stuck on a rail!

Then an idea struck him.

She was a human from up above.

He had struck a deal with Mel at first -- and despite his lies, despite his occasional pitfalls and snarky personality -- he had upheld his end of the deal, and she her own, and he had found that he cared about the woman much more than he first thought he could. They hadn’t been programmed with GLaDOS’ bloodlust (excepting, perhaps, the Anger Core), but as they were expected to oversee the testing and death of subject after subject, cores all had some level of disregard for life. His attachment to Mel had been a surprise, even to him, but he didn’t outright mind, either. But whatever the case, he had been successful once when looking out for his own existence, so perhaps this time he could look out for Mel’s…?

He had WiFi. He’d find a medical textbook somewhere, surely. It was easy: claim to be a medical bot to check for surviving test subjects and assess their health. He knew the Announcer was supposed to wake up subjects in stasis now and then for exercise; he could simply take up a similar role. He had made it as Cave Johnson for...well, not for long, but long enough. “Uh, hey...down there…” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Uh, hello? Can you hear me!? Stand up, maybe. I, uh, I don’t have all day before She asks for a report over here!” She tipped her head back to look over him with a guarded stare, acknowledging him if nothing else. “I, er...ah! I am a medical assessment core. Yeah, uh, that’s me. And you-” what had he said as Cave Johnson? Did that even apply these days? “Astronaut, war hero, or Olympian! Are now going to be subject to our latest test of...well, of...receiving medical care?” Idiot, why would that be a test? “To, uh, oh! To test the functionality of me, the, what did I say...the medical assessment core! Yes, exactly.” Surely there was some preserved food around here, maybe some bandages. There might even be an actual medical assessment core, although that was less likely. Feed her, patch her up, sneak her back out. What could go wrong?

He knew he was doing a horrible job of coming up with a plausible lie as he saw the human’s brow furrow, but she turned her head to look over her arm, weighing the pros and cons of the situation. Luckily for him, the only two people present to witness his horrible display were the human and the Announcer -- and fortunately, the Announcer chose not to comment on their situation at all.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments, kudos, and bookmarks make my day. <3
> 
> [Check out my main Tumblr](https://ariibees.tumblr.com) where I post my own art and fandom work! Come find me and chat!


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